Well, it wasn’t Mama, but at least it wasn’t Dada either. My baby’s first word? Kitty. Those assholes. She chases them around the house (they run because they hate her (and rightfully so – she either pulls the shit out of their fur or plops right on top of them)) and has probably heard me say “kitty” about a thousand times (is that a kitty? that’s a kitty! go get the kitty! be nice to the kitty. don’t pull the kitty’s fur. KITTY don’t scratch the baby!) so I guess it’s not too much of a shock but PFFFFFTTTTTTT. Jason swears that she said “hi” the other day too but until I hear it I ain’t buying it.

In other news, she took her first real steps the other day. She’s been standing for months, cruising for a few weeks, and pushing behind her walker for about a week now but these were bona fide, all-by-herself steps. Sure, it was only a few but it signals that walking is imminent.

As is her first birthday (HOLY. SHITBALLS.)! Three weeks from tomorrow and she has been on this planet for an entire year. Which means:

1. I have kept another human alive for an entire year.

2. I can pack up the breast pump and the nursing bra because it is time to wean, bitchez.

3. I haven’t slept for an entire year. !

4. We havin’ a party! I’ll write about that later. With pictures. Which brings me too..

The point of this blog was mostly just to do a post with some pictures in it because I haven’t for a while. I’ve been putting ’em up like crazy on the facebook but most of y’all (except for my family (hi family!)) are not my facebook “friends” so you won’t have seen the preciousssssss for a while. So yeah, my baby is growing up. And here’s proof:

That’s yogurt. There are at least 30 pictures of me at the same age doing the same thing only with lotion (or vaseline, or mud…)

My mom got her this paddling pool for her upcoming birthday and she loooooved it.

That’s her eating a s’more. Yes. A s’more. Babies get to do whatever they want with the grandparents.

It just took two hours to get my kid to sleep. Two hours, lots of crying, lots of cajoling, lots of teeth gritting. Two nights ago she woke up every half hour until 3 am. So please, tell me, what the hell am I doing wrong? Anybody else have a kid that just won’t sleep or am I a miserable failure of a parent?

So I hesitated to write about this; didn’t, in fact, write about it beforehand for fear of jinxing everything; wasn’t going to write about it even after everything went down because maybe you don’t need to document everything on the internet; ultimately decided to write about it for reasons other than oversharing about my young daughter’s life.

When Louisa was born she had a little bump over her right eye. Nobody really noticed it but me and my husband and since her pediatrician never even asked about it I figured oh well. Then it started to get bigger. And people would ask me what it was. Which made me start worrying about it (my hypochondria blew it all out of proportion until it was baby cancer and she was going to die – yeah, calm down imagination). So at her 9 month check up I asked the pediatrician. She decided it was probably a dermoid cyst and gave us a referral to some sort of ocular surgeon (a very odd woman that I didn’t quite trust to slice into my daughter but she’s pretty much the only one in Vegas so thank God it all worked out) who makes most of her money shooting Botox into vain people’s faces because GOD FORBID WE SHOULD HAVE WRINKLES.

It was indeed a dermoid cyst and didn’t really need to be removed unless it really got bigger and/or started obscuring her vision. Both of which started happening shortly after our consultation so I bit the bullet and scheduled the surgery. Now, if you have any children at all you will know that scheduling your not-even-one-year-old daughter to be not only cut into but put under general anesthesia is terrifying. And it was. And I dreaded it for the two weeks between making the appointment and her having the surgery. Dreaded it so much that I made myself sick (yeah -calm down, gastrointestinal system). And then yesterday came and went in a blur and she was and is fine. Her little eye is swollen so that for the first time in her life nobody came up to us yesterday and said “ohmygawsh your daughter is beautiful, is she a model because she should be, look at those eyes!” etc. But aside from scratching at her stitches a little bit she is none the worse for wear and is tearing around the house like the usual menace that she is.

So here’s what irritates me about the whole thing (aside from the weirdo Botox doctor, the fact that my baby has stitches at 11 months old, and pretty much all of the people in the waiting room at the hospital yesterday). The nurse who had to check us in and quiz me about Lou’s medical history (hint: 11-month-old children have relatively little in the way of medical history – they were born, they had some vaccinations, The End) kept referring to her “deformity”. Um…k. First of all, we don’t use the term deformity anymore. It’s like the word Oriental – only my 79-year-old Grandma uses it. We call them limb differences. Second of all, YOU’RE A NURSE. Please don’t try to make me believe you have never seen or heard of such a thing. While she was querying me about milestones reached (because apparently it is imperative to know whether or not you can say Mama and Dada before undergoing a cyst removal? Yeah – calm down, US healthcare system) she was like “so, is she crawling yet? I mean, can she with her deformity?” Bitch, please. My baby crawls like a boss. She crawls better than your honor student. She was crawling before crawling was cool. “Can she even use her arm at all?” Seriously?! Can you even use your brain at all? She’s missing like half of her hand, the other half works just fine, as does the entire arm/shoulder/BODY that it is attached to. I think I actually laughed at her but it’s hard to remember because it was a tiring day.

I’ll stop complaining now, and maybe just explain to you folks that people are super resilient and can do lots of stuff. Even if they are missing some of their bits. And it’s dumb to expect that they don’t or won’t. And to save you from being a complete dillhole – don’t say deformity to a mom. She might cut you.

Oh my god, you guys. I’m all alone. By myself. Out in the world. Without my baby. Or my husband. And I have no idea how to behave. I’m like my cats when they dart out the open front door FINALLY ESCAPING THE CONFINES OF THE EVIL HOUSE and then they stop short, having no idea what to do next. So many things to sniff! So many places to scratch!

If I was smart I’d be napping but oh well. I’ll sleep when I’m 50.

I finally decided that it’s okay if I need some time alone. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad mom, it means I’m a human. I know, you other moms figured that out a long time ago – I’m a little slow. And good at guilting myself into thinking I’m not allowed to be human now that I’m a mom. But look at me! At the library! Writing in my journal, blogging, staring out the window, thinking! All without obsessively checking on the napping baby or trying to play with her with one hand and type with the other.

Soooo, what should I do now? I live in Vegas. I guess I could catch Thunder From Down Under (I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was just now, looking that up at the library – what if somebody saw? Once a Mormon, always a Mormon), or go gamble away our life savings (oh wait, we don’t have a life savings, scratch that plan), or drink a foot-long alcoholic beverage while wandering drunkenly up the strip. It’s what all the chubby, still breastfeeding (not for LONG though!), sleep-deprived, tragically unhip, thirty-something moms are doing.

What I’ll probably end up doing, however, is finishing this blog, going to buy some SlimFast (I need to lose 50 pounds before I get pregnant again (and yes we’re talking about it but don’t get too excited yet Mom (and Dad) because it’ll be a few months still)) and then going home where I’ll bake cookies and snuggle in for a nap with my baby. Because ultimately that’s where I like to be. And apparently all I needed was 60 minutes alone. By myself. Out in the world.

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